FantasyCon 2011 has announced details of the convention’s programme. The excitement begins on Friday 30 September. More details here.

If you haven’t yet signed up for Fantasycon 2011, why not do so now? Take a trip to Brighton, walk out on the pier and eat fish and chips (whilst fighting off the gulls), and then enjoy the camaraderie of the convention. It’s sure to be a great weekend. Details can be found on their website.

With effect from 1st January 2011, prices for a weekend membership to FantasyCon 2011 rise to £50 for non-BFS members, £45 for members. The price for a day membership (Saturday only) will be £40, so book now to avoid the increase!

FANTASYCON 2011 will be held over the weekend of 30th September to 2nd October 2011 at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton; venue for the highly successful 2010 World Horror Convention.

The first two GUESTS OF HONOUR TO BE ANNOUNCED are: World Fantasy Award-winning author and critic GWYNETH JONES, also known as Ann Halam, and Swedish horror writer JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST, author of the best-selling LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, which was adapted into a movie first in his native Sweden and more recently remade in the U.S. as LET ME IN, starring Chloe Moretz from KICK ASS.

MISTRESS OF CEREMONIES is SARAH PINBOROUGH, British Fantasy Award-winning Author of The Language of Dying and A Matter of Blood.

Other professional writers, artists, editors and publishers already registered as attending FantasyCon 2011 include: Guy Adams, Ramsey Campbell, Vincent Chong, Peter Crowther (PS Publishing), Les Edwards, Simon R. Green, Stephen Jones, Paul Kane, Michael Marshall Smith, Gary McMahon, Adam LG Nevill, Kim Newman, Nicholas Royle, Robert Shearman, Steve Tribe (BBC Books), Rio Youers and many more.

Current cost of registration stands at £45 (£40 to BFS members), costs will increase incrementally between now and the convention. To book your ticket, and for more information about the Guests or MC, please visit the website: www.fantasycon2011.org.

Fantasycon 2011 will be held over the weekend of 30 September–2 October, 2011 at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton; venue for the highly successful 2010 World Horror Convention.

The first two Guests of honour have been announced: World Fantasy Award-winning author and critic Gwyneth Jones, also known as Ann Halam, and Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of the best-selling Let the Right One In, which was adapted into a movie first in his native Sweden and more recently remade in the US as Let Me In.

The Mistress of Ceremonies is Sarah Pinborough, British Fantasy Award-winning Author of The Language of Dying and A Matter of Blood.

Other writers, artists, editors and publishers already registered as attending FantasyCon 2011 include: Guy Adams, Ramsey Campbell, Vincent Chong, Peter Crowther, Les Edwards, David J. Howe, Gwyneth Jones, Stephen Jones, Paul Kane, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Gary McMahon, Adam LG Nevill, Sarah Pinborough, PS PUBLISHING, Nicholas Royle, and many more.

Visit the FC2011 website for more information.

Another FantasyCon is over, and we had a great time, but don’t just take my word for it:

• Jenny Barber: http://bradanpress.blogspot.com/2010/09/fcon-2010-aftermath.html
• David A. Riley: http://davidandrewriley.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon-2010_19.html
• Adrian Faulkner: http://www.adrianfaulkner.com/content/node/53
• The RCMB: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/4060.html?1284984179
• The SFX blog: http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/09/20/blog-fantasycon-2010/
• Louise Morgan: http://loummorgan.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/fantasycon-2010
• Sam Stone: http://sam-stone.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon-2010-and-bfs-awards.html
• Simon Bestwick: http://simon-bestwick.blogspot.com/2010/09/back-from-fantasycon.html
• Mark West: http://markwestwriter.blogspot.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=fantasycon
• Floor to Ceiling Books: http://floor-to-ceiling-books.blogspot.com/2010/09/horr-i-mean-fantasycon-2010.html 
• Ian Sales: http://iansales.com/2010/09/20/space-frogmen-magnetic-shower-curtains-and-jugs-fantasycon-2010/ and http://iansales.com/2010/09/21/undersea-habitats-full-stops-and-low-humour-a-little-more-on-fantasycon-2010/
• Un:Bound: http://hagelrat.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasy-con-2010-round-up.html (which links to lots more, as well as hosting video and audio footage of the event)
• Kai Savage: http://kaisavage.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/fantasycon-2010/
• Stephen Theaker: http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2010/09/mr-theakers-quarterly-fiction-goes-to.html
• Pablo Cheesecake: http://www.theeloquentpage.co.uk/2010/09/20/fantasycon-2010/
• Stuart Young: http://stuyoung.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon-2010.html
• David Tallerman: http://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2010/09/my-first-fantasycon-part-1-all-stuff.html
• David Hebblethwaite: http://davidhblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/fantasycon-2010/
• Laura Watkinson: http://www.laurawatkinson.com/2010/09/22/fantasycon-fantastic/
• Fiskerton’s video footage of the British Fantasy Awards: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=AC0C1746804283BB
• Mangacat: http://lifewhatnots.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon.html
• Jonathan Green: http://jonathangreenauthor.blogspot.com/2010/09/24-hours-in-nottingham-or-how-i-learned.html
• Mike Shevdon: http://shevdon.com/how-to-sign-an-ebook
• Adam Christopher: http://www.adamchristopher.co.uk/?p=1593
• Daniele Serra: http://www.multigrade.it/wordpress/?p=223
• Geoff Nelder: http://geoffnelder.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/fancy-that-at-fantasycon/
• Adam LG Nevill: http://adamlgnevill.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon-2010-nottingham-british.html

Don’t miss out again! The 2011 convention will be in Brighton: www.fantasycon2011.org.

It’s never too soon to start thinking about your next FantasyCon..!

A leaflet for booking for 2011 is up on the FantasyCon 2010 website. Note that payment and form must be received by 25 September 2010.

Never Again edited by Allyson Bird and Joel Lane is an attempt to voice the collective revulsion of writers in the weird fiction genre against political attitudes that stifle compassion and deny our collective human inheritance. The imagination is crucial to an understanding both of human diversity and of common ground. Weird fiction is often stigmatised as a reactionary and ignorant genre – we know better.

The anthology will be published by Gray Friar Press in September 2010 and launched at FantasyCon 10.

It will be a mixture of original stories and reprints… pre-order it NOW!

Story Notes PART ONE | PART TWO

The editors, authors/artist and publisher will receive no fees for this work. Any profits made from sales will be donated to anti-racist or human rights organizations, e.g. The Sophie Lancaster Foundation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Nina Allan Feet of Clay | R.J. Krijnen-Kemp Volk | Lisa Tuttle In the Arcade | John Howard A Flowering Wound | Tony Richards Sense | Alison Littlewood In On the Tide | R.B. Russell Decision | Mat Joiner South of Autumn | Rosanne Rabinowitz Survivor’s Guilt | Rhys Hughes Rediffusion | Simon Kurt Unsworth A Place For Feeding | Joe R. Lansdale The Night They Missed the Horror Show | Kaaron Warren Ghost Jail | Steve Duffy The Torturer | Gary McMahon Methods of Confinement | Rob Shearman Damned If You Don’t | Carole Johnstone Machine | Stephen Volk After the Ape | David Sutton Zulu’s War | Thana Niveau Death of Dreams | Andrew Hook Beyond Each Blue Horizon | Ramsey Campbell The Depths | Simon Bestwick Malachi

Eibonvale Press will be releasing two brand new works at Fantasycon: Blind Swimmer, an anthology on the theme of creativity in the wilderness, with an introduction by Joel Lane, and Douglas Thompson’s second novel Sylvow, from which the author will be reading on the Saturday morning 10am in the dealer’s room.

Blind Swimmer

Isolation is a subject that humans have a tricky and contradictory relationship with. On the one hand we fear loneliness, seeking to banish it with contact with others and suffering considerable negative effects from it sometimes. Fundamentally we are a gregarious species. But on the other hand, a contradicting force often sends us desperately seeking isolation. Maybe this is a symptom of the world we live in that creates the need to escape from it in order to actually achieve things. Or maybe it is a deeper dichotomy in our own psyches. Writers in particular feel this dichotomy, which must be why it is quite a prevalent one in literature. Lovecraft, for instance, wrote about little else. Blind Swimmer is an anthology of stories and novellas that seek to explore this isolation, especially in terms of creativity and in terms of how that isolation relates to the outside world.

The anthology is also a kind of “sampler” and snapshot of Eibonvale Press itself at this key moment in time, featuring all of its writers to date, past, present and near future, in a fascinating experiment in collaboration, with various contributors playing off each other and all giving their best towards a sum greater than its parts. Featuring: Joel Lane, Nina Allan, Gerard Houarner, Rhys Hughes, Brendan Connell, David Rix, Allen Ashley, Jet McDonald, Douglas Thompson, Terry Grimwood, Alexander Zelenyj, and Andrew Coulthard.

Sylvow

In the city of Sylvow, brother and sister Claudia and Leo Vestra made a childhood promise to each other: he would look after the plants and she would look after the animals. Unlike most promises, both of these were kept – each in their own way. Claudia is now a vet – looking after pampered pets or putting down strays and leading a mundane life in the city. Leo, on the other hand, disenchanted with modern urban life, has abruptly abandoned his wife and disappeared into the surrounding forest, his only contact with the outside world being a sequence of dramatic and prophetic letters –increasingly convinced that a semi-sentient natural world is preparing to rebel against its human irritants.

Nature is a strange thing – although we have done an amazing job of cataloguing and observing it, we still know very little about it. Nature always surprises – and always changes, especially under an external influence such as humanity’s devastating effect on the environment. This book follows its cast of characters through a spectacular clash between everyday life and life on the evolutionary scale – as society dissolves and is stripped away under the onslaught of surreal environmental disaster. Douglas Thompson has dug deep into the inevitable guilt that we all feel, as a culture/species, for the disastrous state of civilization and its effect on both ourselves and the world around us. Sylvow incorporates elements of literary surrealism, philosophy, horror, disaster novel and science fiction into a visionary and highly original work.

If you are signed up with BookCrossing, FantasyCon is a great opportunity to release a few books “into the wild” (and clear a bit of bookshelf space to make room for everything you’ll be taking home from Nottingham…) and find them a new home with someone who’ll love them just as much as you have. Just bring a couple along and drop them off when you get to Fantasycon.

Please do take the time to register any books you’re thinking of bringing – it doesn’t take long. Each book will be assigned a BookCrossing code (a BCID) which you then write (or put on a post-it, depending on how you feel about writing in books!) inside. This means you can track the book’s travels on the BookCrossing site – and some have been known to go all around the world.

If you’re not signed up, and you don’t fancy creating your own account, we have a BFS account which members can use – just ask Louise Morgan (LouM on the BFS forums) and she’ll send you the login details.

Likewise, if you pick up any books that have been registered and have a BCID inside, please go to the site and mark them as found – it only takes a minute or two, and again, you can use the BFS account if you don’t have one of your own.

If everyone coming to Fantasycon registers and brings just one or two books, this could be rather brilliant. I can see it becoming a real highlight of the event every year…

Peter will be attending FantasyCon 2010 on SUNDAY September 19 Britannia Hotel,
Nottingham visit www.fantasycon.org.uk for further details.

Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960. He began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. He has also been published in Interzone and the In Dreams and New Worlds anthologies, and several small press publications. His first novel was Mindstar Rising, published in 1993, and he has been steadily productive since then.

Peter lives near Rutland Water with his wife Kate, daughter Sophie and son Felix. Visit www.peterfhamilton.co.uk to find out more about Peter’s books.